ABSTRACT
By the early 1960s Americans were startled to find how little of even the most indestructible kind of wilderness was still unspoiled. Crowds are everywhere in America, at airports, hotels, and libraries, at playgrounds and parks. Perhaps in the threatening conditions of the present world, overindustrialized Americans are motivated by a subconscious death wish. The Act was passed, nevertheless, establishing both a definition of wilderness in law and a National Wilderness Preservation System in fact. The bill to establish Yellowstone succeeded after one of the most formidable, public-interest lobbying campaigns in history—the same kind that swept through the Wilderness Act almost a century later. The protected wilderness existed more by accident than design. Most of its commercial resources, composed of lands by-passed in the rush of settlement and exploitation from east to west, were too poor to utilize or too costly to develop.
